"Like Gross, Snyder seeks to explain the actions of the non-Jews of Eastern Europe, the nearest bystanders to the Holocaust. But unlike Gross, he demands no conscience-searching from Eastern Europeans. Snyder points out that the Soviets and the Germans had ravaged the countries of the bloodlands, whose loss of sovereignty led to social chaos, hunger, threats of death, and deportation. Suddenly, Poles, Ukrainians, and others realized there was a starkly unavoidable presence in their midst, the German desire to kill Jews. It should not be a surprise, Snyder argues, that, by and large, they had little empathy for the Jews. Neither did we Americans, and we were thousands of miles away from Hitler and Stalin. The great debate between Snyder and Gross is a key juncture in the politics of memory in Eastern Europe and a test case for our efforts to understand what the Nazi extermination of the Jews meant to the part of the world where it happened."

Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners.

Macdonald is right to say that the real challenge is not wide reading, which he feels has deteriorated into skimming, but deep reading, “to bring the slow, cumbersome depths into play, to ruminate, speculate, reflect, wonder, experience what the eye has seen.” This is usually the mandate of art rather than journalism or information, and no computer can supply it any more than Time could. But the arts themselves, much like language, were evolving in Macdonald’s day, and his stubborn adherence to the past, his belief in continuity or slow change, kept him from appreciating this.

So what is the vast majority of writers doing? I'll tell you. They're writing SEO copy for godawful, often morally dubious websites. They're writing instruction manuals for online marketing courses through packagers. They're writing educational materials, or editing other people's dissertations. They're writing author bios for online encyclopedias or bands. They're doing work, in short, which doesn't involve a community of writers, or peer respect, or worries about whether too much money is going to affect the quality of their work. Indeed, "quality of work" for most writers most of the time doesn't mean literary flair, honesty or style. It means hitting the right word count with clean copy before deadline. Period.

Steinbeck either made these edits himself or approved them. Either way, the book is as he chose it to be. Certainly an author has the right to shape his books as he chooses. These edits seem also to have made it into a better book. Maybe Steinbeck knew that.

James E. Holmes’s madness, or whatever name we eventually come up with for what motivated him to kill 12 people and wound dozens more, also ran on the power of drama. He allegedly said “I am the Joker” before opening fire, and an employee at the jail where he was arraigned told a reporter, “He thinks he’s acting in a movie.”

On the surface, A Canterbury Tale might appear to believe in divine benediction, but even the irreligious mind should have no difficulty appreciating what the film’s Canterbury eventually represents for the four main characters. It can be seen as a place where one comes to make peace with oneself, finding solace by recalling the struggles of other people who lived centuries ago – and thus momentarily becoming part of something larger (something that doesn’t have to be supernatural). Or even where mistakes might be acknowledged and a form of personal penance done. For the thinking believer and non-believer alike, there is more depth and complexity to be found in this film’s graceful climactic sequence than in all those dramatic scenes of our heroes berating or negotiating with their Gods in moments of crisis.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

The longer-term effect of making the PhD mandatory has been manifold and, arguably, malign. It encouraged, most malignantly, the current malaise of English studies: field specialism. If you spent five years researching a subject, until you knew more about it than anyone living, that is what you wanted to teach once you landed the first job. A subject that had hitherto fostered the undoctored jack of all trades gradually fragmented into a mosaic of doctored specialists.

It is often said that deploying the word "evil" in cases like this risks obscuring what happened, not understanding it. There is some truth in the observation – though the very expressivism of the word "evil" is useful too, keeping the horror of what has happened in view. There is something unspeakable about evil; there should be something unspeakable about evil.

I am surprised that anyone finds this surprising. Doctorates are no longer a demonstration of learning. They're another credential that just about anyone can slog away to acquire. (Of course, nowadays, it is often necessary to get the damn things.) The people mentioned in the article are politicians - careerists almost by definition. Surely I'm not the only person who has encountered individuals with advanced degrees who gave no indication of any great intelligence or learning.

As I mentioned last week, there's been a good bit up rain up here. Yesterday, though, some very powerful storms passed through and when we got back to the cabin last night there was no electricity (no running water, either). Happily, it is is all back on.

What is it about this form with its short, jagged-edged lines, its patterning of words and sounds? What makes it different from chopped-up prose? On this, as on much else, Maxwell is brisk and forthright: if you're going to write poetry, "line-break is all you've got, and if you don't master line-break – the border between poetry and prose – then you don't know there is a border. And there is a border. (A prose poem is prose done by a poet.)"

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

The broader point is not at all that new technologies never work or that the poor cannot adapt to them — no one who has seen the cellphone sneaking in and out of the ghunghat in rural Rajasthan can believe that. It is not even that such a stove cannot be made to work — there might even be one already somewhere that does. But it does remind us that technology works best when it sits lightly on the lives of its users. And most importantly, it warns us not to declare victory too soon — the fact that we think something should work is not enough — it needs to work for the people who use them.

I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed ... the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.

It’s hard to say much about the story without spoiling the fun for those who have not yet read it, or irking those who have. It is a book full of wise and wonderful observations and paradoxes, firmly on the side of Life, the real life of real humans, and savagely against inhuman – and godless – Ideas. And it is often very funny.

These authors have banded together to create a site, “Stop the GR Bullying” with the purpose of stopping what they see as cyberbullying of authors on the GoodReads site… by engaging in a higher level of cyberbullying in creating profiles of “enemies” by posting whatever information they can gleam from their online presence. One of the people they named reportedly got a threatening phone call after her profile went up. With this escalation, as the old saying goes, “shit just got real” (or perhaps, possibly more apropos in this case, “When ‘Keeping It Real’ Goes Wrong”.)

“Still,” Updike said, warming to the argument, “there have been other intricate systems in the history of mankind. The scholastics in the Middle Ages had a lot of intricacy in their intellectual constructions, and even the Ptolemaic epicycles or whatever were ... Well, all of this showed a lot of intelligence, and theoretical consistency even, but in the end they collapsed. But, as you say, the evidence piles up. It’s been decades and decades since the standard model of physics was proposed, and it checks out to the twelfth decimal point. But this whole string theory business ... There’s never any evidence, just mathematical formulas, right? There are men spending their whole careers working on a theory of something that might not even exist.”

To those describing this as a film for the 1 per cent, I say that if there’s any singular POV in this ensemble picture, it is that of working class cop John Blake. In an oddly heartening fashion, the film is almost about him — the common man trapped in the sturm und drang of clashing ideologies and self-serving agendas. Ultimately, the film asks many big questions and refrains from presenting either right or left as the answer. If anything, it warns of the dangers inherent in drawing those lines in the first place.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Let me begin with an admission: I'd heard John Cheever's name (of course), but I'd never made my way to his work. In part, I think it's because - in my head, at least - I associated Cheever with Updike. Not that their writing is necessarily the same. But rather, because they were fascinated with New England in a way that, despite my having been born there, I am not.

After finishing The Wapshot Chronicle, I imagined a line, straight from Sherwood Anderson, to Cheever, to Updike, and beyond (to authors like Jerry Gabriel). And I know, Anderson did not write about New England, but his approach was similar to Cheever's, I think, in its focus on rural communities and the sometimes extraordinary lives of their inhabitants.

I will say: The Wapshot Chronicle grew on me. The final section - which charts the travails of the two boys, Moses and Coverly - picks up serious steam, and concludes with a meaningful (if somewhat predictable) gathering of the clan in St. Botolphs. It's like Cheever is saying: cue that old New England flag.

For me, though, there was one line that saved it all: and that's Cheever's characterization of Leander. The old man, he writes, approached life in a way that was as "hearty and fleeting as laughter." Now that's well done.

I have no dog in this fight, but it does strike me as being a bit like how they dug up Cromwell after his death and hanged his corpse. These teams either won those games or they didn't. And if they won them, doesn't taking the wins away punish perfectly innocent players?

It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

The problem with Darwinian aesthetics and neuroaesthetics is not that art is like religion, something divine that can only be violated by bringing it back to the realm of biology. Aesthetics is different, in that the facts it has to work with are terrestrial, this-worldly. They are the feelings and the thoughts we have in response to works of art, and the feelings and the thoughts that lead us to want to create them in the first place. So it would seem that there is no reason, in principle, why these cannot be illuminated by evolution. But this can only happen if we begin with a full and accurate account of what we are trying to explain.

Standing in the queue for movie tickets for hours and getting them was a common childhood experience for many of us. This was clearly a function of demand and supply. Those who did not get tickets but had the money simply bought tickets in black. This is how the asymmetry in the market worked. Those who sold and bought tickets in black possibly suffered from a temporary pang of guilt. However, with economic rationality taking over, we now have dual pricing – and the rent that was sought by the black marketeer is now transferred directly to the cinema hall. The guilt is washed away and there is a price discovery. However, it has also taken away the livelihood of the black marketeer who would have been a poorer intermediary between the multiplex owner and the consumer. Is that something we need to consider from a moral point of view?

Well, it's been raining steadily here in Tunkhannock since last night and the rain is expected to continue off and in until tomorrow afternoon. The creek down below is burbling away. And the forecast for Philly, I see, calls for rain. As Niels Bohr said, predicting is difficult, especially the future. But humans have an incurable desire to know the future.

Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.

But Barthes’s passion for Schumann (or Sartre’s for Chopin, or Nietzsche’s for Bizet) involves more than relief at escaping severe music for something more Romantic and melodious. The familiarity of certain compositions; the fact that they fall within the limits of the player’s ability, or give it enough of a challenge to be stimulating; the way a passage inspires particular moods or echoes them -- all of this is part of the reality that playing music “is entirely different from listening to it or commenting on it.” That sounds obvious but it is something even a bad performer sometimes understands better than a good critic.

It’s true that Frederick Douglass simultaneously championed both civil rights and economic liberty. But the proper term for that combination isn’t Social Darwinism; it’s classical liberalism. The central component of Douglass’ worldview was the principle of self-ownership, which he understood to include both racial equality and the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor.

A more general defect is that the historical dimension is patchy or absent from the book. For the most part, we go back no further than the Reagan era. Yet a longer sweep is liable to produce rather more mixed results. Schools, hospitals and prisons have often in the past been owned and operated for private profit. In England, the “poor schools” financed by the pennies of working-class parents did much to spread mass literacy before the intervention of the state. In the developing world today, it is modest fee-paying schools which lead the way in expanding educational opportunities for the worst-off. As for prisons, the Father of the Marshalsea took it for granted that his better-off visitors should finance his cell upgrade.

The energy in this portion of Emerson’s essay is palpable, and upon reflection is the same energy I’ve felt exuding from most of the artists I know. People who I consider true artists always seem driven to be constantly creating. Even before one work is finished they are already considering what they want to work on next. Regardless of the physical, monetary, or even emotional sacrifices they need to make in order to do their work as artists, they continue on, the rewards outweighing any losses they incur.

Einstein and the giants of his day could not settle whether quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes. Einstein's 'God does not play dice with the Universe' is often invoked in these arguments (less well known is Neils Bohr's one-time annoyed response, "Stop telling God what to do").

The larger series of which this book is a part—Continuum's New Directions in Religion and Literature—bills itself as offering "a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature." Colón's book exemplifies this ambition, proving equally adept in its recounting of and responding to the variety of approaches to the parables offered by biblical scholars such as Dan O. Via and John Dominic Crossan and literary critics such as Frank Kermode and J. Hillis Miller. Colón is particularly concerned to demonstrate how shabby and often nebulous definitions have pernicious consequences for studies of both synoptic and extrabiblical parables.

I don’t know exactly when everything clicked. There was no single event, but a gradual transformation. As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.” Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!” By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying to argue my wife’s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe.

Stillman’s students, like the ones with whom I’m acquainted, are not crazed wantons. Yes, they’re self-important, judgmental, and confused. But isn’t this the nature of youth? Besides, they’re generally quite charming. They spout oracular judgments on everything from religion to table manners and carefully hold only socially approved prejudices.

Despite all the acclaim he received, Sheen strived to maintain “the simplicity of a dedicated parish priest,” said Monsignor. For Sheen, the priesthood was a precious gift that needed to be nourished through continual prayer. Every day, no matter where he was, even if traveling abroad, he made it a point to spend one hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament. It kept his mind constantly on the divine, and fortified his work.

... the study of sibling memories also convincingly demonstrates how two forces go head to head in memory. There is the drive to represent events accurately, which means being true to the often vivid impressions we have about what actually happened. And there is the drive for coherence, the need to produce a narrative whose elements fit together. In this case, coherence is a matter of agreement between people. Our stories need to make sense to us individually, but they also need to make sense to those who matter to us.

"If Barnes was a progressive idealist, he was also a hard-hearted bastard—litigious, foul-mouthed, the worst kind of control freak. He fell out with everyone he could not dominate, with the exception of Dewey, and demonized anyone who disagreed with him. He became a coprographic crank, and his little institution with its great art collection became increasingly insular—even more so after his death in 1951."

We got to the cabin at about 7 last night, having first done some shopping, then stopping off at the Fireplace Restaurant, where Debbie had prime rib and I had a steak. Once we settled in, though, it was all chill-out time. I slept better last night than I have in months, and it was certainly pleasant after the weather we've been having, to sleep under a blanket.